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It’s a whole new day!
Plunging the future of the 2016 Presidential debates into doubt, Donald J. Trump said on Tuesday morning that he would not participate in the remaining two debates if Hillary Clinton is there.
Trump blasted the format of Monday night’s debate by claiming that the presence of Clinton was “specifically designed” to distract him from delivering his message to the American people.
“Every time I said something, she would say something back,” he said. “It was rigged.”
Well, let me tell you ’bout the way she looked
The way she acts and the color of her hair
Her voice was soft and cool
Her eyes were clear and bright
But she’s not there
Well, no one told me about her
What could I do?
Well, no one told me about her
Though they all knew
[Trump supporters] are accusing Hillary of carrying a concealed ‘communications’ device connected to an earpiece, which they suggest could have been used by the candidate to cheat during the debate. Their rationale? [A] photograph of a bulge that ran down the back of her pantsuit on the night of the debate.
[Trump] can show up before an audience of 100 million without preparation …and talk about serious issues with no more sophistication than your crazy uncle.
“The deeply conservative Arizona Republic endorsed the Democratic nominee for president for the first time in its 126-year history on Tuesday,” [describing Donald Trump as a man] “with a stunning lack of human decency.”
Nicely tripping iambic pentameter in that phrase: A stunning lack of human decency. Pretty.
Perhaps this will be, for some, a moment of illumination:
But SOFT! what LIGHT through YONder WINdow BREAKS?
And therefore, as an econ professor at Bologna University announces to his students in a recent letter, “I cannot in good conscience ask you to respect the plagiarism rules which Bologna University allows its own professors to violate.”
Go ahead and cheat: You’re in Italy!
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UD admires Lucio Picci. His rage at endemic university corruption has been brewing for so long that it’s bubbled up with something entirely new: An invitation to his students to take their part in the corrupt-from-top-to-bottom world of the Italian university.
Why not? The letter, with its examples of several recent cases of highly decorated Italian professors found guilty of rampant plagiarism but who cares, is attracting a lot of attention, which was no doubt Picci’s plan. Good for him.
Not that the shameless Italians will be moved to change anything here; but the larger world needs to be warned about the farcical Italian university system. There are plenty of other countries where you can study.
Trump, by the end of the night, was left complaining to reporters about alleged problems with his microphone, which he suggested may have been sabotaged. Top surrogate Rudy Giuliani told a reporter Trump should pull out of future debates if moderators didn’t agree to be more deferential.
Colin Jost ✔@ColinJost
Trump is sniffling because he’s allergic to the Constitution
Moo U’s president (background here), aka The Boy Who Thought He Could Fly, has grounded himself.
… picked up his business degree at the Haas School and then launched his glorious career of theft on a massive scale. Like Dominique Strauss-Kahn he put in his time as head of the IMF and as an important person at various banks, and he seems along the way to have pocketed whatever he could, however he could.
His latest unpleasantness, which yesterday featured unhappy Spaniards shouting son of a bitch at him as he entered yet another courtroom, involves stealing from credit cards, but there’s so much more.
Yet more reason Berkeley features him as a hall of famer: In 2012, Bloomberg ranked him as one of the world’s worst CEO’s.
Go Haas!
… gets curiouser and curiouser. One of America’s most amoral and at the same time most morally self-righteous institutions now turns to the task of replacing as president a man who raked in millions in compensation while presiding over its financial ruination at the hands of corrupt trustees and other powerful campus figures, starting with Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin. Prominent Yeshiva buildings and programs bear the names of figures like Ira Rennert and Zygi Wilf. Several of the, er, friends of Merkin and Madoff remain in prominent positions on Yeshiva’s notoriously conflict-of-interest-ridden board.
Financially, the school is struggling like few other universities of its size and age in the country. Moody’s continues to rank its bonds as junk and recently determined that the school has a negative outlook. In the past five years, the school has been warned twice (in 2012 and again in 2014) by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education about the possible loss of its accreditation.
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Eight years into the university’s financial crisis, Y.U.’s financial problems give no sign of abating. Two years ago, the school lost $83 million. Last year it lost another $84 million. And six months ago Moody’s reported that it expects the school’s financial condition to continue to deteriorate.
Yeshiva leaders represent so much greed and mismanagement that according to Moody’s the school may have to fold. If it folds, this will be due not merely to gross irresponsibility, but – just as importantly – to the ick factor. The gulf between Yeshiva’s self-presentation as a pious institution and the squalid reality of its financial dealings and some of its backers has grown so wide, the school has so profoundly and insistently disgraced itself, that you just have to laugh. It has become a hopeless joke. A tragic joke if you happen to care about the survival of modern orthodoxy in America.
Given this background, UD understands why Yeshiva is thinking of appointing as president a managerially clueless but possibly actually religiously serious person.
Assuming it is trying to survive, Yeshiva is faced with two sort of impossible choices: It can appoint as president a powerful, brilliant, and maybe even honest money manager who might be able wrestle the corrupt board of trustees down and get the school on a roughly legitimate financial footing.
It seems to have chosen not to do this, which means the board continues on its merry institution-destroying way.
Yeshiva University has gone the other way – it has decided to work on its moral reputation. And, I mean, okay – it certainly needs to do this. But it will end up with a nice Queen Elizabeth on the throne and the same bad boys behind the throne.
There are no indications that [Ari] Berman has the experience or even the drive to radically alter how the school functions in order to move it out of the crisis it now finds itself in. While it might be nice in theory to have a president with a PhD in Jewish thought at the helm, the selection of an MBA might have actually guaranteed that the school would be able to matriculate future Jewish thinkers and leaders.
To make matters even nicer, the seemingly endemic corruption and parochialism of Yeshiva’s culture continues unabated with Berman.
Soon, the trustees now guiding the university, including Berman’s uncle, the influential communal leader Julius Berman, will vote on the nominating committee’s selection.
Julius Berman is Exhibit A for what UD is talking about in this post. Notoriously, Berman presided over a holocaust victim restitution fund that for sixteen years was massively embezzled.
[Isi] Leibler singled out Claims Conference Chairman Julius Berman and Executive Vice-President Greg Schneider for particular criticism in a recent Jerusalem Post opinion article. Leibler, a former World Jewish Congress official who lives in Israel, wrote that instead of launching an independent review following the fraud, the two men orchestrated a “Stalinist” board resolution that absolved the Claims Conference of all blame.
“Such contemptuous rejection of all managerial accountability in the wake of such a massive fraud would be inconceivable in any public company or government body where resignations or dismissals would have been mandatory,” Leibler argued.
See what I mean? You just have to laugh. Yeshiva University is irredeemable.
… gets a university-wide prize for doing her part to maintain the illusion (is there anyone left who actually holds this illusion?) that disgraced jockshop University of North Carolina is a serious institution of higher education.
Chapel Hill’s new awardee (name: Joy)
Gets a prize for maintaining the ploy
That full-time sport jocks
Prioritize Locke
Over the next game against Illinois.
Comments, in Atlantic magazine, from people who’ve stopped watching football.
The Penn State/Jerry Sandusky abuse tragedy made it clear that any reprehensible act can be excused as long as the team is winning…
Baylor [University] wanted a winning football program and part of the cost of that was the victimhood of multiple young women who were students there…
Football has always been a violent, dangerous game that offers boundless prosperity to a highly select few and ruin to many, but fond memories and enjoyment to most…
It’s a bunch of large men assaulting each other in an attempt to cross a line with a ball. I know it’s barbaric, but it’s also very entertaining—like a violent chess match… They essentially trade their physical and mental well-being for pride and large sums of cash…
[I]t is, at its heart, an amoral beast that chews human bodies up and spits them out in pursuit of nothing more or less than the almighty dollar.
… is featured in the Guardian newspaper.
The animal shelter-cum-pop-up store was bustling. The dog-sweaters were available in a range of sizes and seemed to be doing particularly good business, as was a purple dog-sized bandana.
Frances Eby, 58, bought a T-shirt which had a famous image of Morrissey with a cat on his head and the words: “My life with Fanny the wondercat”. Eby was originally going to be called Fanny, she said, after her grandmother, but her parents backed out.
Eby had travelled from Maryland to see the Morrissey show. She was with her friend Diane Seltzer, whom she met in 2007 through a Morrissey message board called “Mozketeers”. “I’ve made lifelong friends through Morrissey,” she said.
That’s true about Grandma Wasserman.
We didn’t call Frances Fanny when we were growing up, but we did call her Fooey.